February 24th, 2006

hi!! guys, yesterday i developed a simple “Hello World!” webservice with java. With Netbeans 5.0 IDE its a breeze to create web services. It comes bundled with Apache Tomcat 5.5.9 and Sun Java Application Server 8.2.

You can find the quickstart tutorial here to develop web services. Just follow that tute and you will be fine. I will tell you how to consume the same using .net. I used Visual Studio 2005 to consume this service. I assume that you have the url for the wsdl of the webservice which should be similar to, http://localhost:8080/WebApplication1/NewWebService?WSDL.

1. Open Visual studio. “File->New->Website”. If using VS2003 then, “File->New->Project->ASP.NET Web Application”.2. A web application should have been created by now and you have the “design view” of “default.aspx” or any other aspx page of your choice.3. Press Ctrl+Alt+L or View->Solution Explorer. Right click on your project name and select “Add Web Reference”. In the windows that pops up, give the WSDL url and an “Instance Name”. My instance name was “JavaAdd”.4. Add a button and a label to the asp.net page. Double click the button and paste the following code.

February 23rd, 2006

After the grand event on 13th, 13 Microsoft Student Champs from Chennai and Bangalore, left for Coimbatore from where we had to proceed to Erode and Madurai after visiting some colleges there. As it was already late by the time we left Chennai, we stopped for a mid-night dinner at a nameless roadside dhaba. This is where all the fun started 😉

When the bus stopped, we were all shocked to have dinner at a place like this. Jk pushed all of us, came to the front like a gaint and asked, “Where is the damn menu card?”..We all roared into laughter when he asked that. Tell you, this was the worst place where i had eaten till now. The oothappam they gave started stinking the minute he served it. Donno how i managed to eat it :(. And Vivek gave us a surprise by ordering chicken noodles ha ha ha…and it was like “veratti (dried cow dung, used as fuel) cut in pieces and soaked in kurma”…

We reached Coimbatore next day by 10.30 AM. As it was already late, we had to skip our hotel and proceeded to PSG directly. Imagine all 13 of us, without even brushing and dull from the night’s sleep entering a college ! Thankfully, we were given rooms for refreshment, which gave us enough time to brush and get ready for the 1 hr session at this college. We had prepared a separate set of quiz questions. The first question was an easy one; the CEO of Microsoft. Lots of hands came up immediately and a guy confidently told “Bill Gates”. When i said the answer was wrong, all the hands came down in a milli-second. Another guy told it was “Allen Paul”…(some of the champs were already giggling). None of the colleges gave this sort of an answer. Well, PSG shocked us beyond the bizzare dreams. The answer is Steve Ballmer.

After this college, we went to GCT. The crowd was pretty ok there…no fumbling with the CEO of Microsoft. They also answered the $1 question. We reached the hotel by 7PM and had our lunch! On a side note, our breakfast was at 1PM Dinner consisted of juices and salads !

[15th Feb 2006]This day was an awesome one! All of us went to Black Thunder water theme park, to chill out the travel pressure. It is very cheap. For Rs.260 per head, all rides are free and is allowed for unlimited number of times. Ofcourse, they don’t give free lunch ;). We had a good time pushing everyone in the water after they got on to their floats he he…Reza triggered a mini-tsunami as soon as he landed on the water from the slide…Rajagopal had a tough time getting on his float and as soon as he got on the float, everyone pounced on him and pushed him once again ha ha ha…Even i got pushed twice or thrice…

Of all, the wave pool was the best. It simulated the sea environment by creating waves thro’ the water. The whole pool had a depth of only 7 feet, starting from 3. It was awesome enjoyment when you have to jump up as the wave hits, otherwise a huge amount of water will fall on you.

The best part of this day was during the lunch when the hotel waiter was ragged for not getting us extra pappads. You should have seen the waiter’s face go red when Deepak asked him whether they were still frying the pappads. He was embarassed by Krishnaa when he asked “whether water was the only unlimited thing here”…

This nice day came to an end after the excellent dinner at Recidency.

[16 Feb 2006]We went to Kongu Engg. College today. The crowd was good here, they answered the quiz questions. Krishnaa finished off, by doing a demo of Office 12. Reza also did a demo of VS2005. On the way to Kongu, we had a really tough argument of netbeans vs. VS2005 IDEs. Though i wont say which side won ;), the argument was good enough ‘cos we were able to able to convince the college staff’s that we are more of student technologists

The evening passed off by a visit to Tirupur, the t-shirt town of India. We purchased some nice ones and rates were 5 times less than what you have in Chennai.

[17 Feb 2006]We went to Thiagarajar College today at Madurai. After visiting KLN college and Sethu Institute of technology, we visited the Meenakshi Amman temple. On the way to the temple, the Sethu guys sang some Madurai folk songs for us. They were a really cool bunch.

This day was also the birthday of Siva. We were treated at Taj on Microsoft’s expense 😉 and he got splashed with chocolate cake all over him. The exciting trip came to an end with this.

It was an awesome experience in planning something this big and making it happen too. The main reason for some colleges not answering simple questions was that, their exposure towards the technology and industry as a whole is very limited/nil (null, for the geeks out there). At the end of this tour, we feel confident that we have sowed interest for technology in them.

This is just the beginningTowards the end of the month, we are moving to Andhra. In the near future, we are touring Karnataka and Maharashtra too 😀

February 20th, 2006

ha ha! Tell you what, this “hi” thing during every chat got very boring for RSA (Ram, Supratik, myself) that we devised something else. Infact Ram came up with this idea and got the majority of votes 😉

The idea was that we start our conversation with “bye” and continue working backwards thro’ the chat session. It is exciting to watch people’s reaction when we say bye at the beginning of a chat conference, and we 3 burst out laughing. Here is a chat excerpt…

February 19th, 2006

Sun Tech DaysThis is a technical conference that Sun Microsystems (inventor of the Java programming language) holds annually at different countries. Last year, it was in Bangalore and this year it was in Chennai, at the Chennai Trade Center. The crowd turned out to be more than 4000 and they had a bonus 3rd day. It had 2 tracks called the “Netbeans day” and “Solaris day”. This big event ends with the JavaOne conference that is held at San Fransisco, USA.

As usual, the 2 day event was superb with experts showing off the new features of Java language, developing web services using netbeans IDE, sun java studio creator, sun java enterprise studio, AJAX and a lot of other cool stuff. The sessions i liked the most was the ones on mobile devices, web services security, AJAX, Matisse (the new GUI creator for netbeans) and developing web applications using the sun java studio creator.

All the tools mentioned are 100% free. Netbeans 5.0 can be downloaded from here. By becoming a member of SDN, you can download Sun Java Studio Creator 2 and Sun Java Enterprise Studio for free. Even the membership for SDN is free.

A Java jacket is given to 1 person among the audience. 6 people have to volunteer from the audience and they have to showcase their unique talent. Based on the response of the audience, he is given the java jacket. This year it was won by Sivanand working for HCL.

The Community BandwagonMyself and many Microsoft Student Champs from Chennai and Bangalore worked on an idea called “The Community Bandwagon”. The main purpose of this was to promote technical usergroups and create awareness about the latest technologies, particularly .NET. As part of the plan, we had to visit colleges in and around Chennai and talk to students about technology. We covered about 4 colleges per day and went to more than 12 colleges in Chennai. The Bangalore guys joined us on 7th Feb.

After enjoying a superb dinner with the Bangalore people, we set off to colleges from 8th morning. We took a bus with us to different colleges and told some students of each college to paint a portion of the bus. The painted bus will then move to other colleges. This was absolute fun and every moment was recorded. At the end of the tour, the bus was completely painted and it looked colourful with the creativity of the students.

In every college, we spent about an hour and half by giving out pamphlets on Microsoft Academic Project Program, Imagine Cup. From the 20 of us, some of them were selected to talk at each college on introduction to the user group and its activities etc. We conducted sudoku contests, JAM and a quiz session at the end. Those who got the answers right were given t-shirts, visual studio 2005 express editions, visual studio 2005 trial editions and original windows xp professional. We received very well at every college we went and the event was a huge success.

The Community Bandwagon at Chennai lasted for 4 days covering more than 12 colleges and it culminated with the “Date with .NET” event organised solely by/for the students. The event was held at Kamaraj Memorial hall, Chennai on 13th Feb 2006. Eminent speakers at the event included the Anna University Vice Chancellor Dr. Viswanathan, Former CSE HOD at IIT-M Dr. MuthuKrishnan, Microsoft Academic Lead Mr.Chander Sundaram and Microsoft Academic Developer Evangelist Mr.Ashwani Sharma. More than 1800 students all over the city participated and in one word, the event was “excellent”.

After an excellent week of ceaseless excitement, the Bandwagon team moved on to a tour of South India comprising of Coimbatore, Erode and Madurai. More about it in the next blog 😉

February 12th, 2006

Hieee all,

I’m really excited today ‘cos a lot of exciting things have happened in the past week and the good news is, ITS GOING TO CONTINUE FOR THE NEXT WEEK TOO. Before i blog on the exciting last week, an important thing has cropped up. Yuvi has geeky tagged me and here goes the rules and my specification of dream computer.

Rules:1. The Tagged victim has to come up with the specifications of their dream personal computer.2. The Specifications have to be feasible : They atleast have to be in the lab. So, you can’t ask for the Google Supercomputer :D.3. The Victim needs to tag atleast two more people. If you are tagged again, you have to start the process again if the dream computer specification has changed.4. The tagger needs to leave a comment (that he has been tagged) on the victim’s blog 😉

Apart from this, a digital camera, iPod and 40 GB USB harddisk won’t cause any problem :D. Hmm…thinking along the same lines, it would be better to have a Toshiba laptop with the following specification, 80 GB HDD, 2 GB RAM, DVD writer, integrated memory card reader, bluetooth, IR (so that i can program it as my TV remote control 😉 ), WiFi and other extra bells and whistles such as webcam, USB mouse etc. 😀

February 4th, 2006

Yippppeeeee!!! those who are dying for free asp.net 2.0 hosting with SQL Server….guys, we have a boon ! http://www.aspspider.net/ is offering free asp.net 2.0 hosting along with SQL Server, which means im gonna register there right now!

Registration is limited and hope u get there soon. Thanks to Ramesh for this info.

February 3rd, 2006

Ever since the UPS burst, i have been wondering how many things have gone BOOM! by the touch of my hand ;-)…I have a small list here. Lets go through them 1 by 1…

1. Once upon a peaceful time, i had an age old computer. It very badly needed an upgrade. So, my dad brought with him, his friend who used to assemble computers and sell them. I gave him the new configuration that i would need. Soon, i unplugged with my very own hands 😉 and gave it to him.

The next day, i got a call from him saying he met with a small accident :-o…Thank God, nothing happened to the upgraded CPU. He also escaped with some minor bruises he he.

2. We had a philips iron box in my house. After putting it to good use for about 2 years, it fell down and some parts broke away. I repaired it and connected to power and ya…u would have guessed by now…The minute i lifted it, it burst off ha ha…

Last but not the least, on the day i breathed first on planet Earth, there was a horrible cyclone wrecking havoc, with most telephone lines damaged…no power too…Infact, my mom told me that a huge tree had come off the roots in the very hospital where i was born…fortunately, there wasn’t any damage 😉